As for the probe it’s self, it was a penetrometer to test the compressibility of the local soil, basically an arm that would drop to the ground with a sensor. Unfortunately the lens cap was in the way so the sensor, as the Wikipedia article amusingly states “ended up measuring the compressibility of the lens cap.”

Space is difficult, expensive, and dangerous. It is difficult because of the fuel needed, especially to get off the Earth and into orbit (as one commenter here once noted, the Rocket Equation is a bitch). It is expensive because it is design intensive and manufacturing intensive; we usually make “one” of each type (which really means not many of each type), there is rarely anything like mass production (Iridium, Globalstar and some other proposed satellite constellations being exceptions). It is dangerous because when things go wrong, they can catastrophically and suddenly end the mission.

Notice that the US has often performed flyby missions before sending orbiters. Flyby missions are easier than getting into orbit (less fuel needed). Even ESA did a comet flyby of Halley’s Comet, using their Giotto spacecraft, three decades before they orbited Comet 67P/C-G. (One danger for Giotto was debris from the comet, which she apparently ran into while traveling through the coma, reducing the science returned.)

I may want to add to the “difficult” part the fact that many important lessons are learned the hard way: in space. Which is a result of the danger to the spacecraft and adds to the expense of space exploration.

Robert noted a lesson that the Soviets learned the hard way: “later information revealed that a certain computer chip used in all the Soviet Mars probes had a fundamental flaw that caused them to fail in the harshness in space.”

Despite being full of nothing, space is harsh. There is radiation that will kill your computers (and harm your crew, if exposed long enough), the vacuum will suck vapors out of many materials (so don’t use those materials in space), temperatures are burning hot on the sun-side and freezing cold a few feet away on the dark-side, things such as liquid fuels behave differently in zero-G, and the spacecraft is designed to be lightweight enough for the rocket to get it into space yet strong enough so that it survives vibrations from the launch rocket.

Various problems can occur in space. The Japanese burned off the rocket nozzle on their Akatsuki satellite to Venus, but recovered well enough to get into orbit five years later. The US lost the Mars Observer satellite to Mars, most likely because of a leak in a valve (determining exact cause can be difficult with very little data sent back from millions of miles away). The US missed the Moon with its early launches in the early 1960s, sometimes because the launch rocket sent the probe way off course.

The trick is to be able to learn those lessons when the best evidence is out of reach or, as with SpaceX’s recent failure, burned and melted on the pad. Fortunately, the article says, “ESA engineers expressed confidence that they had received enough data to find out exactly what happened, but it would take some time to sift through all the information and interpret the findings.”

LocalFluff: Though it was thought for many years that the 1971 dust storm was what caused the failure of the Soviet Mars 3 lander after only 20 seconds on the surface, later information revealed that a certain computer chip used in all the Soviet Mars probes had a fundamental flaw that caused them to fail in the harshness in space.

The sister ship, Mars 2, crashed upon landing. The orbiters were designed to take their pictures automatically as soon as they got into orbit, which means that all their images were useless because Mars was covered in a dust storm at the time.

It seems to me that both you and Gealon should fork out the bucks and buy my Chronological Encyclopedia of Discoveries in Space. You would then have this information at your fingertips and would no longer have to guess, sometimes incorrectly. :)

Gealon: The Soviet Venera landers returned more than one image, and they did it on multiple missions, Venera 9 and Venera 10 (October 1975) and Venera 13 and Venera 14 (March 1982).

Kyle asked, “Has Russia ever successfully landed on Mars?”

No. The closest they ever got was one Soviet lander, which sent back data for a few seconds, than failed.

I’m leaning towards Phobos though.

In any case, without a camera to take surface pictures, this lander was doomed to obscurity from the start. People like pictures, without them no one was ever going to care what technology it was supposed to test. Now it’s just another sad statistic.